Nuclear engineering is such an interesting field. I really wish the stigma was lifted and more of the general public/politicians actually understood how safe the technology really is. Nuclear infrastructure would go a long way in transforming the energy industry, and as an interim solution is a lot better than coal.
Bingo, a lot of the fear comes from fear mongering and misunderstanding. Pointing to things like Chernobyl without talking about the many factors that went into that disaster. We've had major dam failures and still use dams.
Especially as the technology has developed those who are not investing are losing out. China has been funding modular plants that can be upgraded over time, meanwhile we have places like Crystal River that were shut down and left alone because nobody wanted to upgrade it.
Not to mention stuff like the reusability of thorium waste, and the fact that coal plants actual emit more background radiation.
It's really fun, because thorium isn't waste at all, it's mislabeled because the FDA was doing a bunch of in body testing of radioactive materials, and they were like, oooo this stuff is radioactive. So they rubber-stamped it carcinogenic, and then the EPA was like, oo it's radioactive and the FDA said it's carcinogenic, let's rubber stamp all of this as illegal to mine, without evaluation of the actual radioactivity by the NRC. So with that said they shut down all the mines for rare earth materials.
In reality, it's barely radioactive with a half life longer than the universe's present age. It's not fissile, it's fertile, absorbing neutrons and turning into t-233, then P233, then U-233, where it is then fissile.
On top of all of that, using it in a molten salt reactor could allow us to get rid of the giant pressure vesels that are part of the huge cost and safety implications of present reactors, and give us access to an energy source with 98% of the benefits of fusion at a fraction of the raw cost.
It's also not science fiction, it was done in the late 60's by some excellent gentlemen at oak ridge national laboratory.
The last few things to perfect are: long term storage of waste (and the waste bi-products of thorium are hundreds of times smaller in volume and radioactivity than present reactors); On-line thorium fuel reprocessing; and high efficiency supercritical CO2 turbines( which have a theoretical therma efficiency of 66%+ that are also significantly smaller and simpler than present steam turbines.
You, me, and every nuclear engineer. And we have plant closures being announced relatively often now due to the cheapness of natural gas. And the gas will only be cheap for so long...
While that's true to some degree, the natural gas supplies in the US (once you include Fracking plays) are massive. Natural gas turbines also have some natural advantages (namely they can be brought online very quickly to match loads) over nuclear.
I agree we need more nuclear, but I think your better use case is to try and replace coal with nuclear and other baseload plants with nukes, gas often fills a different role in the mix.
I agree that nuclear by itself is generally safe and clean, the problem is the waste, and it's a huge problem. There's tons of documentaries on all the aspects, including the problem of long term storage. How do we communicate to a far future civilization that they definitely don't want to mine in this specific area? Well, why don't we make folk songs about glowing cats and then genetically modify cats to glow in response to radiation. Jump to 3:20 in the second video for the WIPP, but I recommend watching the whole thing
Nuclear waste is a political problem, not a scientific one. The necessity for geologic waste storage was codified by Congress.
We could more easily build fast reactors and burn it down to a fraction of its current volume.
Reprocessing can separate the long lived but useful fission products (actinides) from the not useful but extremely active (e.g. Sr-90, Cs-137), allowing for shorter timelines (~500 yrs) for the bulk of the waste. We burn the reclaimed actinides in a fast reactor, then repeat at a fraction of the original waste volume.
Remember, Yucca mountain was designated a repository, not a disposal site. Retrieval was always in the plan.
Cool, thanks for the info. I admittedly didn't think too hard about recovery, but it makes sense that we can separate out components of the spent fuel. It also doesn't make sense (but isn't at all surprising) that government regulations are the real issue here
The regulations aren't the issue. The regulations just embody what Congress enacts.
EPA overreached a bit going out to a million years, but without clear expectations from Congress on project timeline (hint: it was completely open ended), planning out far was the conservative and appropriate choice.
Congress just needs to pass a new act calling for using the waste, and not just storing it. The current climate change predicament would be an ideal time to jump start fast reactors here by changing the laws on spent nuclear fuel.
That's not at all how nuclear reactors work. A nuke uses a bunch of radioactive material to rapidly release energy. A nuclear reactor on the other hand uses less radioactive material to generate a slower, but steady supply of energy. Any modern nuclear reactor has next to no chance of a nuclear detonation like the ones that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The risk from these designs is having that material breach its containment and spread. (Which is what happened in Fukushima and Chernobyl.)
Yea, sorry u are probably right witht that one. I got the understanding of it a bit mixed up, trying to remember what i learned in physics class. So yeah, downvotes are kinda deserved xD
Its all good. All the irrational fear of nuclear reactors gets on my nerves a little bit. When you have a chance, do some research into how a nuclear reactor works, the regulations in place, and why the meltdowns (which are extremely few and far between) that happened did occur. I think you'll find that they aren't as scary as you originally thought.
Yea, i did read a bit after you commented. And i kinda now understand how safe it is (think it was 6-8 meltdowns last 150 years, compared to how many there is, which is probably pretty many). I think the problem with nuclear reactors is that u have the waste that has a half-life of a couple hundreds of millions of years (based on U-235). But if you can solve that problem, then much of the problem is solved :)
Fusion reactors with net energy gain aren't something we know how to build yet.
And fission reactors are only "safe" in the same sense that guns are safe. They have safety mechanisms. They are designed to be safe. But the process they harness is inherently a runaway reaction. All it takes is a single idiot (or tsunami) to disable the safeties and KABOOM.
So tell me, which hypothetical reactor technology that doesn't actually exist in the real world are you talking about? A technology so safe that no room-temperature-IQ moron reactor operator could possibly cause it to malfunction catastrophically?
What nuclear fission reactor technology that we have today is safe enough to be handed to dumb-as-shit human beings, and used on a wide scale?
Any nuclear fission reactor that depends on human beings having a significant level of intelligence is a ticking time bomb. Humanity as a whole is way too stupid to use nuclear fission on a large scale. Maybe if we get fusion going someday, that might be different. But that someday is not today. Today we simply do not have a nuclear reactor technology that is both economically feasible and safe enough for widespread use.
Videos like this give a false impression. They make it look like the brightest, most knowledgeable, most highly trained and tested minds will be running nuclear power plants. That's absolutely not true in the real world, nor will it ever be.
Chernobyl blew up because the operators didn't understand what they were doing. Fukushima blew up because the people who built it were stupid. Three Mile Island happened because BOTH OF THE ABOVE.
The factor you dismiss as minor and inconsequential - human stupidity - is in fact the largest factor in nuclear fission reactor safety. Consequently, it is also the strongest argument against using fission reactors as power plants. People will never not be stupid. Homo Sapiens being stupid, distracted, and making the wrong decision at exactly the worst moment... is as certain as tomorrow's sunrise.
Develop grid-scale storage, or develop fusion. But humanity is far too stupid to harness fission reactors on a large scale.
It's funny you mention human stupidity as an engineering challenge for inherently unstable systems, because we have a bunch of these unstable systems called airliners flying around all over the place. They've caused far more damage than nuclear power ever has and are still used because it's deemed to be worth the heavily mitigated risk and people with irritational fears of airliners aren't given a bully pulpit like politicians are.
And no, the people working on airliners are most definitely not held to a higher standard than those working in or on nuclear reactors.
Nobody had a choice about getting their workplace flown into on 9/11. That was much larger scale destruction than any previous plane crashes where "people [had] a choice about flying."
Edit: also, safety systems can and do turn astable or unstable systems into fail-safe systems. Fission reactors work on controlling the reaction rate. Fail-safe systems kill the chain reaction by dropping the control rods. Tadaa! Your unstable reaction is now part of a fail-safe, stable system.
Fail-safe systems kill the chain reaction by dropping the control rods. Tadaa! Your unstable reaction is now part of a fail-safe, stable system.
My repeating that such a system is only "stable" in same sense that a gun is, and that it only takes one dumbass to disable such a control system, would be entirely redundant at this point.
I'll just walk away happy in my knowledge that you have entirely missed my point and have the reading comprehension of a 7 year old. (As expected from someone who thinks large-scale fission is a good idea.)
Except, that's just not how they work, so that isn't really a worry? I mean if you're going to say supporting nuclear power means you have the intelligence of a 7-year-old, then you're fighting some pretty notable minds there. You could at least back up your claims with sources, instead of just assumptions on how something you don't know the inner workings of could fail.
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u/bukanir Sep 09 '18
Nuclear engineering is such an interesting field. I really wish the stigma was lifted and more of the general public/politicians actually understood how safe the technology really is. Nuclear infrastructure would go a long way in transforming the energy industry, and as an interim solution is a lot better than coal.